Provincial politics of COVID-19
Premier Doug Ford has gotten into a bit of trouble lately. Although in general I think his handling of the crisis has been exemplary, he has refused to release a detailed list of "hotspots" that Ontarians should avoid because that would "stigmatize" the people living in those spots. Well, yesterday the news dam broke and we found out where the hotspots are: they are all in the Greater Toronto Area! Now we know why Ford didn't want to release this data.
Doug Ford has always treated the premiership job like it's "Toronto city councillor on steroids". He's supposed to be ruling the entire province, but there's only one city he mainly cares about. So now the entire province stays on lock-down just so the people of Toronto won't have to feel bad that they still need to.
This article seems to disagree with the previous one slightly. It contains the unsourced sentence "As of Wednesday, Peel, York, Ottawa, Durham, Waterloo and Windsor-Essex County followed Toronto as regions with the greatest number of COVID cases." So Waterloo ranks 6th worst among the 34 Public Health Units. The previous article didn't mention Waterloo in its table of the top eight PHUs, sorted by case-count since May 10 (and no reason was given for that odd choice of cutoff date). Wikipedia says that Waterloo Region has the 7th largest population among the 49 census regions in Ontario.
An additional wrinkle: in June 2019 the Ford government eliminated the Ontario "Local Health Integration Network" (which was previously responsible for distributing money to hospitals). This was necessary in order to fire 416 people and avoid filling an additional 409 vacant positions - and to save $350 million a year on statisticians, senior physicians, and other useless people. Some governments (such as Alberta and the US feds) have gotten into trouble for making cuts to healthcare administration just before a pandemic hit. This factoid is just sort of hanging behind those two newspaper articles linked above, without ever being mentioned. Also not mentioned: Joe Cressy, one of the two "critics" quoted for the second article, is a member of the NDP which is the Official Opposition to Ford's Progressive Conservative Party - so Cressy is obligated to find fault with the premier in any way he can.
p.s. For those of you in Michigan, I realize that "the dam broke" is not a pleasant metaphor right now. Please consider moving to Canada, where we do a much better job of maintaining our infrastructure and we do not suspend all government regulations during an election year.